Grapho’s Face

I took photographs of the outfit, Natural Things, v.01, which Grapho has designed, to upload onto Flickr today. And I noticed something quite bewildering: Grapho looks like my father. Well, not my father, as I knew him, obviously. But, as he was as a young man, to judge by the many photographs of his youth that I have seen over the years.

What is bewildering is that I did not notice this during all these past days where I have been Grapho in SL, sometimes 6-7 hours a day, hammering away at the outfit. Maybe I was too busy working , maybe it is the light in there – but the truth of the matter is that I only noticed it when I opened the photos in photoshop to crop them.

Grapho has been working on his appearance quite a bit of late, so we have been popping open the appearance editor every so often. Another thing is that in order to be able to design garments for women, Grapho also had to create a female shape to try them on. This latest manifestation of his is largely the result of my switching back and forth between the sexes, with that radio button down there, trying to create a truly androgynous avatar for the sole purpose of photographing some of the clothes with that. I thought it might be nice to have that ambiguous look for the unisex outfits, as this latest one has turned out to be. Anyway, at some point in all of that experimentation I sort of liked what happened to Grapho and decided to save the shape as the new Grapho shape.

So, what resistant part of my psyche did not notice that what I had saved was actually a fairly close representation of my own father?

And it is also somehow significant that this all happened while I was switching back and forth between male and female, since the shape that I started out with was the default Alpha shape (who is a more or less plausible lookalike of me in RL). The one that I saved for Grapho was not the immediate mutation that SL gave me of course – that one was rather hideous. I continued to play with that for a very long time, switched back and forth between the sexes with that one as well, even saved some of the interim stages. But, when all is said and done, this male shape is a vastly mutated and transformed regeneration of Alpha. Generations away – but still.

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Ruina Kessel2.21.09 / 8pm

Isn’t it funny how parts of ourselves, hidden forces in our psyche, sneak out in our artwork?

I painted a picture of an “angel”, a female who had cut off her breasts and sewed her navel shut to make herself sexless and unborn, and stitched wings to her shoulders, to be an angel, perfect. It was an idea I’d had in my mind for a while, and I finally painted it, but did not think at all about the expressive/emotional implications of the image – I’d simply made something out of an idea I was interested in. But while describing the image to a friend in a letter, somewhere in the middle of a long paragraph, I realized the painting was a self portrait. Not that it looked like me, but that it was a picture of my soul and a struggle I’ve felt for a long time. The revelation was stunning and made me breathless (and made me weep, to be honest). How had I completed a work of art without realizing what was going on??

The mind works in mysterious ways!

alphaauer3.9.09 / 11am

I am deeply touched/honored that you chose my blog to share this. The reason that I delayed responding is that I am quite lost for words Ruina. What you wrote is so meaningful, so candid, and so beautifully expressed that any string of utterances as a response would be banal and tepid by comparison…

About

Alpha Auer is a Second Life avatar who used to be irreverent, mischievous, politically incorrect and frivolous. What her current state of mind might be is anybody's guess, including that of her much bemused human.

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Elif Ayiter is a designer and a researcher.

Her texts have been published at academic journals such as the Journal of Consciousness Studies and Technoetic Arts. She has presented creative as well as research output at conferences including Siggraph, Creativity and Cognition, Computational Aesthetics and Cyberworlds.

She is also the chief editor of the journal Metaverse Creativity with Intellect Journals, UK and is currently studying for a doctoral degree at the Planetary Collegium, CAiiA hub, at the University of Plymouth with Roy Ascott.